Let’s Talk About The First Ghost Rider Movie

You know, the first Ghost Rider film really wasn’t that bad. I recently re-watched Nick Cage’s debut as the Spirit of Vengeance. I won’t say that this was a classic, but I was certainly entertained by it. Here are five things I really enjoyed about this film.

1. Peter Fonda’s Mephisto was taken in a completely different direction than the Marvel comics version. By not making him a big red devil, Fonda made the lord of the underworld a lot more creepy and a subtle character. In line with that, I liked how the rest of the supernatural characters were more human than monster in appearance.
2. The visual effects were awesome.
3. Sam Elliott’s Carter Slade (the original Ghost Rider) was a great addition to the story, as it gave Blaze a mentor, something that is at times lacking in the comics.
4. Cage enjoyed this…a lot. It’s a pretty well-known fact how much the actor loves comic books, and this was his first comic book movie. He lobbied long and hard to get the title role, battling Johnny Depp for the spot. This translated very well for all the  publicity he did for the film. You could tell that he was legitimately excited about the movie in all of his promotional appearances. I know that is part of the job, but you could tell he genuine about it.
5. It gave us this Jackson Hewitt commercial:

Do I need to say any more?

Ghost Rider Fun

For those of us without an iPhone or Android powered cell phone, it can be depressing that you can’t do all those cool Instagram photos. Well to those of us who are kicking it old school, there’s Pixl-O-Matic. This website based service allows you to make some really awesome vintage style pictures.

The Ghost Rider picture above was done through a process of using Pixlr-O-Matic filters and then running the resulting image through Photoshop, repeating the process over and over again to get the colors washed out. My goal was to focus all the crazy lighting effects from his chain, since this was a figure of the Dan Ketch version of the hero, whose weapon was a mystical chain.

The end result was this, and I’m pretty content with the final project. So let me know what you think. In the meantime, we’re getting closer to Nick Cage reprising the role of the Spirit of Vengeance, in the appropriately titled Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which hits the big screens on February 17, 2012.

Pixlr-O-Matic